The measuring of the spatial position of objects has many areas of application, for example in the control or regulating of various machines and apparatus in industry, medicine and in particular in robotics, where the accuracy of the positioning of the tip of a robot arm, tracer or the like substantially determines the manufacturing accuracy that is possible. There is therefore a need for methods that determine with great accuracy the location position and where applicable the position in space of an object, such as for example a robot gripper arm.
Distances can be determined contactlessly by measuring a path length covered by an electromagnetic beam, for example light. For this, the electromagnetic beam passes along a path between a reference position and the object once or a number of times, so that from the path length covered by the beam the distance can be derived (TOF method).
DE 10 2004 037 137 A1 proposes the combination of a TOF measurement with a further optical measuring method such as a triangulation method or an interferometric measuring method in order to improve measuring accuracy.
DE 10 2008 045 387 A1 and DE 10 2008 045 386 A1 describe position determination using light pulses, whereby the phase position of a signal component is determined, which oscillates by a multiple of the repetition rate of the sequence of light pulses, as a result of which in a relatively large distance range the determining of distances can be achieved with great accuracy.
DE 10 2010 062 842 A1 describes a method for determining the absolute position of a target object using an interferometric measuring arrangement whereby an intensity of the measuring signal after passing along the measuring path is determined as a function of time, in order to determine rough information for a length of the measuring path and by means of a reference beam a phase signal is determined as fine information for a length of the measuring path and is combined with the rough information.
The task of the disclosure is to set forth a method and device for determining the position of an object, which can be used for many applications and enables great measuring accuracy to be achieved.